Posted
by
samzenpuson Tuesday March 04, 2014 @01:42PM
from the go-ahead-and-ask dept.

Author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and The Art of Unix Programming, Eric S.Raymond (ESR) has long been an important spokesperson for the open source movement. It's been a while since we talked to the co-founder of the Open Source Initiative so ESR has agreed to give us some of his time and answer your questions. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

Depending on how you are counting or weighting the count (ie do the number of times 0 and 1 are used in binary/computers count?), I would say that 1 would win against 0, since zero only showed up with the Arabic numbering system. So, releative to the whole history of man, it is a fairly new invention.

Now, to keep on topic, I suppose that I should put this in the form of a question for ESR, so...

What is your opinion of the relatively recent Arabic introduction of the number Zero to the field of mathematics?

Depending on how you are counting or weighting the count (ie do the number of times 0 and 1 are used in binary/computers count?), I would say that 1 would win against 0, since zero only showed up with the Arabic numbering system.

That had occurred to me. Perhaps we can at least agree that 1 is the loneliest number.

I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of
unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for
essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as
the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal
blunders in the history of medicine.

You picked an extremely bad example there; Turing was atypical in a way that damages your case. If you examine the actual circumstances of Turing’s exposure, you’ll discover that he was remarkably and willfully self-destructive about it. Outed himself, under circumstances where he could easily have covered and (as I read it) the cop was trying to look the other way. Still, I’m not “pro” Turing’s suicide, just refusing to blame anyone else for it. He made his choice and died. End of story.

In all seriousness, why is this guy still a thing in the Open Source movement? He wrote a few books in the 90s, very good ones, but he's been irrelevant for years and he's a nut. He has nothing to offer.

I just looked up that Haitian earthquake quote using your own link. Eric is not arguing that the earthquake was caused by a voodoo curse. All he's arguing is historical accuracy--someone really did perform a ceremony that's pretty much a curse. He's not saying that the curse caused the earthquake, only that the curse ceremony itself was not something someone just made up yesterday because they didn't bother to check the history books.

All he's arguing is historical accuracy--someone really did perform a ceremony that's pretty much a curse.

You're giving him quite a lot of credit, not only does he assert that the curse was real and effective, he also declares that he's a "third degree wiccan" and then identifies the deities he would have would invoked. There's no question that he believes the Haitian people actually invoked the santeria deity known as Ogun to liberate them from French domination, and that the earthquake may have been Ogu

I think if you read "invoke" in Eric's posting as "appeal to" rather than "cause to appear" you'll see what I took him to be saying. The one thing he doesn't believe in is literal religious magic. I am with you on all the other examples, though.

That one is incredible. The fact that he isn't asking "Do you accept these negative observations about black people as fact without any evidence?" shows what a massive, unthinking racist he is. And I've emphasized "unthinking" for a reason; for all his squawking about rationality, he consistently makes judgements based on his emotions and prejudices rather than basic logic, in a way that a barely-educated child would have learned not to do.

I never believed the 2010 Haiti Erthquake was caused by a voodoo curse, and I'm astonished that anyone interpreted that post in that way. What I found anthropologically interesting is that something like Robertson's "satanic" invocation seems actually to have taken place. Not actually "satanic", but within Robertson's impoverished terms of reference that's about the only way he could describe an invocation of the loa.

I believe, and have repeatedly said, that the supposed "scientific consensus" on CAGW is not a conspiracy but an error cascade. I think most scientists are honestly trying to do right, but have been overly credulous about data and models that have been (and continue to be) fraudulently manipulated by a tiny minority of them. Those of you who think this makes me some sort of nut are going to have some explaining to do when measured GAT drops out of the bottom of the IPCC's 95% confidence band, which looks set to happen before the end of 2014.

I might reply to some of these other questions at more length, but these two deserved to be dispatched immediately

I believe, and have repeatedly said, that the supposed "scientific consensus" on CAGW is not a conspiracy but an error cascade.

With all due respect, human beings do not cascade errors, machines do. What you're suggesting is that hundreds, thousands of PhDs, all taking either their own measurements or analyzing a broad corpus of measurements collected by generations of researchers, of all manner of phenomena, are all arriving at the same erroneous conclusion, over and over, and that no one with the qualific

This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1940s 1930s — see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century.

All you apologists weakly protesting that this is research business as usual and there are plausible explanations for everything in the emails? Sackcloth and ashes time for you. Th

So have you become a total crackpot since September 11th, or was it something that was always sorta brewing under the surface.

It was always brewing under the surface.

He is a blind follower of extreme libertarian ideas. For example, a long time ago in a personal discussion I showed him how under the specific libertarian rules he was suggesting I could buy all the land around a person's house and starve them to death since they couldn't leave. He didn't bat an eye. He kept insisting that "free market rules" wouldn't allow this, as if by magic, rather than rethinking his simplistic position.

Yes, because political ideology makes everything else in a persons life irrelevant. What have YOU done for the open source community? I mean other than make bad political analogies that have no baring on reality. Any political system taken to an extreme is bad. A glass of water is good and healthy, downing in an ocean is not. That doesn't make water bad.

I would expect that in a libertarian society, when you buy a house you'd buy the right-of-way to get to the nearest road system, so nobody could cut off your access. You would also buy title insurance on your right-of-way just like you buy title insurance on the rest of the house today. Eventually there would be an ecosystem where anyone who registers themselves as owning property also registers the status of the rights-of-way through their property (because nobody will transact with you if you don't do i

Buying a right-of-way into a "road system"? ESR libertarian utopia has no such thing.

Once you have "an ecosystem of roads" as you suggest which is maintained by road fees and requires public access so you can get to all places you want to go, you have just reimplemented government owned public infrastructure under a different name. This is what typically happens when people get a chance to implement their simplistic libertarian philosophies: it either devolves into a lord of the flies scenario (Somalia, Sea

Once you have "an ecosystem of roads" as you suggest which is maintained by road fees and requires public access so you can get to all places you want to go, you have just reimplemented government owned public infrastructure under a different name

Nonsense. In the libertarian utopia, the network of roads is a monopoly owned by someone else with no accountability or democratic input. Hooray!

Some background: ESR changed portions of the Jargon File to reflect his nutty personal politics, there was a predictable shitstorm, and since then ESR took his Jargon File and went home, no more updates.

How many Apple products do you have in your house? More to the point, looking backward to Opensource projects trying to produce a desktop/laptop replacement and comparing those projects to proprietary like Apple, does it change your perspective or thinking in any way? Oh and currently, what is your favorite handgun?

it's been almost 20 years since your write tCatB...i gave it a quick read and thought, "well, it *is* dated now, isn't it?" altho i am old enough to remember when its' ideas were pretty cutting edge.

given the current state of software development (ie the ease of use of PHP and the fact that, without a doubt, the cathedral model has won), what would you either like to change or add to your original thesis?

The cathedral model has won? I'll admit I haven't actually read the book, but I understand the basic premise, but if you're pointing to the Apple and Google app stores as proof of "winning", I think you're overly simplifying things. The existence of Android itself (with its Linux kernel) is proof the bazaar is also winning, not to mention the fact that most servers are running LAMP stacks, and that Linux itself (Android or otherwise) is found in all kinds of places now. Don't forget the success of the Fi

It permeates everything you write: the moral assuredness that You Are Right. I'm all in favor of positing that a position someone takes is the right one -- that's human nature. But your whole "I speak for the hackers" tone, wherein you seem to feel the need to put your views forward as representing others', puzzles me. I give, as a case-in-point, your "Sex Tips for Geeks [catb.org]" as exhibit A, but, really, most any of your writings -- most definitely including your handling of The Jargon File [catb.org], as well as your stance on homosexuality [ibiblio.org] -- qualify. Care to comment?

As a long time "Unix philosophy" advocate, and in the light of the announced switch to it by Debian, Ubuntu, and basically every other major Linux distribution, what do you think of systemd, and the tight vertical integration it intends to bring as a standard plumbing for (most of) all Linux distributions?

I don't suppose you have any pointers for breaking into an entry-level managed IT position from a short lifetime as a freelancer (ages 10-23?). Anyways, guess what your book taught me: alias joke="fortune -o | tee $(tty) | sed -e 's/\n/\.\.\./g' | espeak -v en-us+f2 -s 150"

I recall reading (and re-reading on occasion) the Halloween Documents. Have you written anything regarding any other opponents to OSS, or perhaps a look back on them and see what the end effect of Microsoft's attempts did long term?

One of the issues w/ Open Source has been the freedom to redistribute software downstream - be it just binaries, just source or any combination of the 2. Do you think there are any good ways for software companies who make their software open source to prevent their customers from effectively becoming their competitors - by giving away or selling cheaper what they were sold? Or is the only alternative going for a shared-source approach, as opposed to open source, where redistribution can be explicitly prohibited?

What do you think about shared consensus technology (i.e. bitcoin)? Are they the bazaar while centralized entities (like the Fed) are the cathedrals? Do you think these technologies can be used in other areas in addition to bitcoin and play an important role in the future Internet?

So, in the light of a) the dot.com bubble, massively under- or non-regulated, and the as close to free market as they could make it economic collapse of '07-08, in what way Libertarianism's goals have prevented the collapse, or moderated its affects on all the folks hit hard by it, as opposed to government intervention, as weak and cut back as early as it was?

Hi, there is currently some debate about the many eyes theory over on HNews (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7342352) about why it's a fallacious argument, but in my view they have it all wrong, in that a core component of Linus's Law is that the amount of code is directly inverse to the amount of eyes that can hit all of that code (or a significant percentage).

Therefore, in my eyes it is the problem of code bloat that is undermining the open source movement more than anything. For example, the Linux kernel is now at, what, 10mil+ lines of code? That's insane. Minix 3, on the other hand, is at ~15k?

I have had it running on a spare old boxen for a few months now, but I would say you aren't addressing the point, which is mostly in how the code is written. I'm not claiming it's ready for production at all, but I think it is making a lot of changes based on principles that Linux/BSD are too entrenched to rethink, and I feel like we need to rethink the early days of OS design a bit more. Eg, lets have a new debate on kernel architectures.

Are you sincere in your vehement G+ rants on Global Warming or is this a clever exploitation of humans "Backfire Effect [youarenotsosmart.com]" (when given evidence against their beliefs, people can reject the evidence and believe even more strongly)?

What particularly made me think this at one point was: "Does that kind of language persuade anybody"?

So it seems these days the most effective method of DRM is a network interface, like that used by Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc... You cannot run your own instance of Gmail or Facebook, and you certainly cannot see or modify the code. At the same time all these companies are pressuring us to push our data into their servers by not supporting or coming up with solutions that let us continue to control/manage our data on our own machines and private networks. What can open source do to stem that tide? What about open source licensing? Could webkit or mozilla have slowed down the encroachment of Chrom/ium and its pro-Google agenda if it had more defensive licensing terms like something similar to the GPL? How do we convince hackers to hack on open-source 'website programs', like an open Gmail or an open Facebook (e.g., Diaspora)?

Your comments in The Art of Unix Programming about Apple/Mac developers being diametrically opposed to Unix developers in development style and emphases (designing simple, user-friendly interfaces from the outside in) were quite interesting. I am wondering about your perspective on Apple now. My interest is specifically in Apple's contributions to open-source (WebKit and LLVM, chiefly) and your take on those. It seems to me that Apple has done quite a bit to foster an alternative ecosystem to the GNU environment, for instance in FreeBSD's adoption of clang as their default compiler; and also it seems to to me that WebKit has supplanted Gecko as the most widely used browser framework. Curious about your viewpoint here.

Do you think it would be possible to break into those computers that control the nuclear missiles and launch all the missiles like in that movie Wargames and start a nuclear war with the Russians, and if you think it's possible could you like tell me how, and could you like send it to my email and use like super secret encryption so that the NSA won't detect it, and make the instructions really clear so I can follow them. THANKS!

In his book on the Unix philosophy, he held up emacs as an excellent example, and said some definitely negative things about vi. I thought it detracted from the book. By rejecting software used very heavily by a large number of Unix/Linux geeks, it seemed to be overspecifying the group the philosophy belongs to.

I would like to know how he feels about being a male and having to 'earn' his procreation right. Especially since, if he had born a women and wanted a child - the ease of enslavement of a male (not always the father) for up to 24 years would be the only hurtle. And she Never Never Never Never a need to show even sanity - never mind the hellish torture males are required to go through today to even be considered. Could and should society do the same for women?

Your stance on AGW seems to deny the error-correcting features of the scientific method.

So which do you think is more likely: that AGW-deniers are primarily politically-motivated and don't give a crap about simple facts (like the greenhouse effect of CO2) or that the scientific method is deeply flawed?

I know that you do not like GPLv3 due to the fact that you stated that it "punishes" those who use it. The question being, do you think that there is a way to influence large corporations, who have no intention of being a part of the Free Software Movement, without the use of licenses such as GPLv3?
Also curious as to whether you have read the comic Everybody Loves Eric Raymond